Callus Care

It’s all too common to see people proudly filming their torn, bloody calluses and posting them on Instagram as a badge of honour, ‘Hey, look how hard I’ve been working! Now I’ll be out of action for a week but I’m really hardcore. I chose not to nurture my calluses as that wouldn’t make such a great IG post!’. I’m assuming you’re not one of those people, as it’s unlikely you’d be reading this article.

A callus is an area of thickened skin that’s developed because there’s a lot of pressure or friction in a specific area and build up on your hands from lifting weights, climbing, hanging or swinging. They tell the story of how you move and can reveal any imbalances (if you notice your left index finger is more callused than your right it’s likely you’re using the left one more). In the natural world it’s unlikely we would develop such uniform calluses as the variety of branch thicknesses and rough texture would create more variable loads than the ones which occur when lifting a bar (which is smooth and the same width) every day.

If you decide to leave them unattended then beware:

An unattended callus can devlop a blister underneath it.

A thick callus eventually cracks, extending painfully down into the sensitive layers of skin.

Calluses have the habit of ripping off at the most inopportune times, so by keeping them thin and smooth it offers you the most protection.

Leaving a callus to become rock hard is like taping a pebble to your hand and leads to dysfunctional compensation patterns.

I eventually developed my own system of looking after my hands as I’d had enough of the stinging sensation of open wounds and flappy skin. So, dear reader, I’m sharing some tips that might help you avoid this unpleasantness too.

i. First things first, don’t pick them! It sounds obvious but all that happens is it signals to your body you need to make them thicker.

ii. Soak your hands or remove them after a shower as they’ll be soft and a lot easier to remove.

iii. Take your callus remover of choice and carefully take off the tough, top part.

iv. Moisturise daily with a hand balm containing beeswax and honey for the most nourishing, healing effect. Buzzbalm and Our Tiny Bees are two UK based companies making hand balms from their own beehives. Support local and small businesses where possible!

It’s all too common to see people proudly filming their torn, bloody calluses and posting them on Instagram as a badge of honour, ‘Hey, look how hard I’ve been working! Now I’ll be out of action for a week but I’m really hardcore. I chose not to nurture my calluses as that wouldn’t make such a great IG post!’. I’m assuming you’re not one of those people, as it’s unlikely you’d be reading this article.

I consider Aldi a barometer of the times. Last week I was perusing the mythical middle aisle and came across organic, Japanese matcha powder. I’ve been in the health and wellness world for coming up to 20 years and remember a time when it was a struggle to find many ‘superfoods’ in health foods shops, let alone a small supermaket. Then you see it on a Starbucks menu and know it’s reached the big time.

If the axiom ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’ is true, then it isn’t a surprise to note how modernity’s love of reductionism has its fingerprints all over the movement world. All too often I see people training in a compartmentalised way, working parts of their body in one plane of motion, seemingly forgetting that movement takes place in glorious 3-D.

For most of our time here as a species we’ve been mooching around barefoot as our feet are superbly engineered to deal with rough and uneven terrain. The barefoot movement of the last decade has sought to unshackle our feet from the casts of shoes, supported by the resurgence of interest in all things wild and natural.

A reductionist approach to health is symptomatic of an old paradigm, one that is being undermined more and more by research showing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Health isn’t just the absence of disease or infirmity, but a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being - defined as such by the World Health Organisation.

As time moves on and more research is done on the subject it becomes increasingly clear that sitting at a desk all day isn't good for us, in either body or mind. The modern office based lifestyle is very different from the lifestyle of our prehistoric hunter gatherer ancestors, and yet our bodies aren't all that different at all, and this is the crux of the problem, our bodies just aren't equipped to deal with long periods of being still, if we were, we would be a tree, perfectly designed to sit in one place of years upon years.

We spend a large chunk of our lives lugging around inherited beliefs and assumptions without ever stopping to take stock of whether we believe them or if they serve us; we’re the product of our environment, the caregivers who shaped us, instilled their values into us. Now we’re all grown up, we reflect it back out into the world and these stories we tell ourselves shape our internal model of reality.

Who among you has sworn off coffee because it doesn’t fit into your clean living regime?Coffee is one of the first things to be sacrificed on the altar of health and giving it up is a sign you’ve committed to the task of upgrading yourself.

For a lot of people, this marks their off-season of outdoor training, either retreating to the indoor gym or the sanctuary of the sofa. Wind, rain, cold and frost can be seen as signals to bed-in and hibernate because, as humans, we are naturally drawn to comfort and seek it every chance we get.